Concerning Cannibalism

THE subject of cannibalism, though usually evaded, or very gingerly handled, by flesh-eaters, has a most direct and important bearing on the various issues of the Food Question, and should therefore, I think, be kept well in view and “rubbed in” by vegetarians. Every lecture on flesh-eating ought to touch on cannibalism as illustrating a past chapter in the great history of Diet—a past chapter as regards the leading and so-called civilised nations, but to this day a present and very instructive chapter in the world’s remoter regions—from which we may learn certain lessons as to the feelings, arguments, and fallacies that necessarily attend the gradual process of transition from one dietetic habit to another. The flesh-eater almost invariably affects to look on cannibalism as something monstrous and abnormal, a dreadful perversion of taste which has no sort of connection with the civilised “meat” diet on which our manhood is supposed to depend; but the real facts show that the truth is quite otherwise, and that the position of the African cannibal who is being proselytised to give up his man-eating is in many respects precisely analogous to that of the civilised flesh-eater who is worried by the vegetarian propagandists. The glories of the old English roast beef may be advantageously compared with the glories of the old African roast man.

We have been repeatedly told by the scientists that what we have to do is to eliminate all sentiment from the choice of food; it is a chemical not emotional question. Dr. Andrew Wilson, for instance, laid it down for our guidance (Illustrated London News, February 27, I897) that “animal matter, being likest to our own composition, is most easily and readily converted into ourselves,” and that “this last, be it observed, is the end and aim of all feeding.” But let us see where this scientific gospel carries those who believe in it. If moral considerations are to be removed from the diet question, and we are to look only for what is “likest to ourselves,” evidently (as was pointed out to Dr. Wilson) the perfect diet is roast man, and all the arguments now used to defend flesh-eating are equally good to defend cannibalism. “Can I assimilate him?” should be one’s inner thought when looking on “a man and a brother”; and many books of travel show that this is the inner thought (often converted into action) of those who happen to dwell in the district of the Congo, where Dr. Wilson’s delightful principle prevails.

Dr. Wilson was much nettled at having the logical conclusion of his own theories explained to him; and it is therefore instructive to note that another scientific authority has lately pushed to the farthest point the argument from which Dr. Wilson ran away. The following is quoted from the Medical Press of June 9, 1909:

Dr. F. Gowland Hopkins, speaking at the Royal Institution last week, is reported to have asked the question: “What would be the most efficient food of man?” The answer to that question he gave us by saying that the most sensible person is the cannibal, as he gets precisely the quality and proportion of the foodstuffs needed by the human body by taking them directly from that organism. In consuming his own kind he eats exactly the right stuff. The nearer species are allied, he argued, the less difference is there between the chemical constituents of the tissues of individuals, and therefore the less “the work thrown on the processes of digestion and conversion, and therefore ape must be more nourishing to man than is beef or mutton.”

In the light of this statement, which is at least candid and outspoken, it is interesting to study such a book as Captain Sidney L. Hinde’s “The Fall of the Congo Arabs”—valuable for the light which it incidentally throws on the subject of cannibalism. Where there is no sense of sympathy with that which is akin to us, man will hunger and thirst for the flesh and blood of man. We must amend Pope’s famous line as follows:

The proper diet of mankind is man.

The African cannibals are only convinced that human flesh is the best food for them, and they are accordingly determined to have it, in spite of all the attempts of European faddists to substitute the flesh of animals. Why limit our diet? they argue in effect. Why refuse any of Nature’s gifts? We will have both—the flesh of men and the flesh of animals, for experience shows that a “mixed” diet is the preferable one.

Judging from what I have seen of these people (says Captain Hinde), they seem fond of eating human flesh; and though it may be an acquired taste, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they prefer human flesh to any other. We could never buy smoked meat in the market, it being impossible to be sure that it was not human flesh. . . . Some tribes cut long steaks from the flesh of the thighs, legs, or arms; others prefer the hands and feet; and though the great majority do not eat the head, I have come across more than one tribe which prefers the head to any other part. . . . The Manyema freely admitted their practice of eating human flesh, which they described as saltish in flavour and requiring little condiment, though certain parts, such as the heart, were sometimes mixed up in a mess of goat’s flesh, and on one occasion, after a fight, Livingstone saw the bodies cut up and cooked with bananas.

Another point clearly established by Captain Hinde is the great prevalence, and even increase, of these practices.

So far as I have been able to discover (he says), nearly all the tribes in the Congo Basin either are, or have been, cannibals; and among some of them the practice is on the increase. Races who until lately do not seem to have been cannibals, though situated in a country surrounded by cannibal races, have, from increased intercourse with their neighbours, learned to eat human flesh.

The habit is universal in game-hunting districts, on battle-fields, at executions; even cemeteries are robbed.

During the war in which we were engaged for two years, we reaped perhaps the only advantage that could be claimed from this disgusting custom. In the night following a battle or the storming of a town, these human wolves disposed of all the dead, leaving nothing even for the jackals, and thus saved us, no doubt, from many an epidemic. . . . A volunteer drummer who had been with us for some time disappeared, and we imagined had been killed. A day or two afterwards he was discovered dead in a hut by the side of a half-consumed corpse—he had apparently overeaten himself, and had died in consequence.

This isolated incident, however, must not be taken as reflecting on the hygienic merits of cannibalism, for Captain Hinde gives evidence of the splendid health of the Batetela tribe, avowed cannibals, who live on the strictest scientific principles. “Through the whole of the Batetela country one sees neither grey hairs, nor halt, nor blind; even parents are eaten by their children on the first sign of approaching decrepitude.” When a criminal is to be executed, “he is immediately torn to pieces, and disappears as quickly as a hare is broken up by a pack of hounds; every man lays hold of him at once with one hand, and with the other whips off the piece with his knife; none stops to kill him first, for he would by doing so lose his piece.”

Many curious anecdotes are told by Captain Hinde which illustrate how inveterate is the habit of cannibalism among these races—inveterate as the habit of flesh-eating among Europeans. In one case a man who, when on sentry duty, had shot his own father, complained that it was very hard lines, since he was unable to eat him; he took care, however, that the body should be given to his friends. Here is another instance of irrepressible attachment to the Andrew Wilson formula:

That same week a young Basongo chief came to the Commandant while at his dinner in his tent, and asked for the loan of his knife, which, without thinking, the Commandant lent him. He immediately disappeared behind the tent and cut the throat of a little girl slave belonging to him, and was in the act of cooking her, when one of our soldiers saw him, and reported what he was doing. This cannibal was put in irons, but some two months later I found him in such a wretched condition that, fearing he would die, I took him out of the chains, and gave him his liberty with a warning. Scarcely a fortnight had passed, when he was brought in by some of our Hansa soldiers, who said that he was eating the children in and about our cantonments. He had a bag slung round his neck, which, on examining, we found contained an arm and a leg of a young child. As three or four children had disappeared within the fortnight, and there had been no deaths amongst them in camp, this was at the trial considered sufficient evidence against him, and he was taken out and shot, as the only cure for such an incorrigible.

The flesh-eater, however, while dealing thus severely with the incorrigible cannibal, is obliged to admit his perfect innocence and naturalness in making the demand for such food. “Prisoners or servants,” says Captain Hinde, “have often spoken to me in this manner: ‘We want meat, we know you have not enough goats and fowls to be able to spare us some, but give us that man [indicating one of their number], he is a lazy fellow, and you’ll never get any good out of him, so you may as well give him to us to eat.’”

Nor can it be maintained that cannibals are a specially degraded race, for Livingstone bore testimony to the physical beauty of the Manyema, whom he said he would back against the whole Anthropological Society; and there is plenty of evidence that, both in Africa and in the Pacific Islands, “it is frequently the case that cannibal races are less cruel and bloodthirsty than many tribes not addicted to the practice,” and that they exhibit “frequent traits of affection for wife and children.” There is, therefore, it appears, an undoubted respectability among some classes of cannibals—a fact worth the attention of those among us who justify flesh-eating because so many respectable persons, devoted husbands and fathers and mothers, are known to practise it.

Vegetarians have a right to ask their flesh-eating friends to put aside any merely sentimental aversion, and come to some definite conclusion about cannibalism in its relation to their own diet. It is evidently arguable that roast man, like roast beef, “gives strength,” “benefits trade,” and has the weight of traditional experience and scientific judgment in its favour; also, it is quite possible to utilise in its defence many of the indirect arguments on which the apologists of flesh-eating rely, as that it is “necessary to kill,” a “law of Nature,” among mankind as among animals, and so forth. Cannibalism, in fact, is the diet of diets for those who would devour what is “likest to them selves,” and it behoves civilised flesh-eaters either to respect the doctrine in the case of others, or to reconsider it in their own.

For here is the moral of the whole matter. In that humane instinct, which makes it impossible for men to prey on fellow-beings with whom there has once been established a sense of sympathy and kinship, lies the only true condemnation of the horrible practice of cannibalism; and it is by this instinct that travellers are moved to speak of the savage diet with the disgust which it so fully merits. But there is the further fact that this same instinct is also fatal to flesh-eating from the very moment when man has realised his own kinship with the animals; only, unfortunately, the flesh-eating European has not yet realised this kinship, any more than the man-eating African has realised his kinship with his fellow-man. In the gradual discontinuance of cannibalism we see by anticipation the similar process of the gradual discontinuance of flesh-eating; and, while the too sanguine among us should take warning from the obstinate adherence of certain tribes to barbarous customs, we are justified on the whole in concluding that there is a real, though extremely slow, advance.

Henry S. Salt

The Humane Review, 1909-10, pp. 247-252